This article provides a brief introduction to articles reflecting on the current state of conversation regarding religion and violence. I begin by noting the occasion for which the articles were developed, then note some of the points made by each of the authors.

Buddhist communities worldwide have been energized by the recent politicized violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. These acts of Buddhist-influenced violence have mobilized transnational Buddhist groups in condemnation and in support of the violence. As evinced through recent examples, the ambivalence of the sacred exists in religious traditions, including Buddhism. This article reviews these examples and looks at the larger challenge of including Buddhism within comparative works on religion and violence. Instead of focusing solely on textual sources and doctrine, this essay argues that it is important for scholars to include cultural forms of religious authority in order to better understand and to address Buddhist-inspired acts of violence.

There has been little dialogue between academic communities studying ancient India and scholars working on violence in modern India. Part of the reason has been suspicion concerning the ideological foundations of Indology amongst social scientists and modern historians. To better understand religious violence in today’s India the historical perspectives need to be taken into account.

This piece provides a pithy analysis of past, current, and future works dealing with the moral regulation of armed force in Islam. It provides suggestions for two issues that those interested in the moral regulation of force ought to consider in moving forward.

The premise underlying this article is that religions, like all institutions, do what is necessary to endure. Like other religions, Judaism has adjusted survival strategies ranging from quietism to militarism. The Jews of antiquity engaged actively and successfully in bloody wars that were considered to be divinely and ethically sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire, militant responses to communal threat came to be regarded as self-destructive. “Holy war” was then removed from the repertoire of Jewish endurance strategies through the development of safeguards intended to prevent zealots from declaring war and thus endangering a weak and dispersed community. This move was sustainable within a particular historical context, which lasted until the modern period. Following traumatic modern pogroms and the Holocaust, however, military passivity came to be regarded as endangering Jewish survival. Consequently, the traditional safeguards were effectively removed for a significant sector of Jews, thereby allowing for a return to biblical-influenced militancy.

In this response to the commentaries by Torkel Brekke, Reuven Firestone, Michael Jerryson, and Nahed Zehr on Religion, War, and Ethics, I reflect on the ways in which these commentaries help to illuminate the role that texts play in the construction and reconstruction of moral traditions. I describe the texts in the anthology as contributions to ongoing conversations in which participants draw on precedential texts to authorize, prohibit, endorse, or condemn particular uses of armed force. As a collection that places these texts side by side, Religion, War, and Ethics helpfully enables both intratraditional comparison demonstrating the diversity of positions within any one tradition and intertraditional comparison illustrating similarities and differences in both the arguments and historical development of different religious traditions’ discussions of ethics of war. I conclude with some cautions regarding how such comparison is best carried out.

This article applauds the rich collection of texts assembled by Reichberg, Syse, and Hartwell, but agrees with the other commentators that those texts must be situated in their social time and place if they are to be understood. Furthermore, the term “violence” is analytically worthless and should be eliminated from our critical vocabulary as an impediment to understanding how different communities have attempted to regulate recourse to lethal force in the pursuit of their ends.

Journal of Religion and Violence:
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Issue: 3
Stephen Jenkins, The Violent Subjugation of a History of Violence:
The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism. By Jacob P. Daltonview |
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